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Passion, First And Foremost

I think passion is the most important trait for an entrepreneur. Without it, a team will not follow, investors will not join, users will not pay. Passion is all that matters and success depends on enough passion: whether you muster enough passion for your startup or whether you garner enough passion from your team. Passion alone won’t make or break a startup but it can determine its success.

Most will say that the main predictor of success for any startup is product/market fit where the focus lies on having a product that satisfies the market or founder/market fit where the important thing is having knowledge of the market; it’s not that I disagree or dismiss these concepts – they are important and I believe both can (and should) be worked and improved on – but I think we need a new predictor called passion/market fit. It looks like this: a founder or founding team must be passionate enough to satisfy the market.

In theory, it will predict whether there’s enough interest from the people involved to get the idea off the ground, before you even think about product- or founder/market fit (which you should, by the way, so I’ll write a post about that later on). It will determine whether you’ll have success in moving to the next stage of building a product and growing your startup. Knowing this right from the get-go is key to surviving in the future, or shifting your focus.

Passion is what makes you believe, try, fail, persist, conquer. It’s the best driver of success, it’s the strongest motivation an entrepreneur and his team can have, it’s a dream worth chasing. Passion is a lifetime hobby, an endless energy source and a personal religion.